Roger Waters quotes

Roger Waters is a British musician, songwriter, and co-founder of the legendary rock band Pink Floyd. As a principal lyricist and creative force, his work shaped the band's distinctive sound and ambitious concept albums. He remains an influential figure in rock music and an outspoken advocate on political and social issues. Here are 77 of his quotes:

My mother told me I said to her, at age three, 'I'm going to go to Italy and get my father in a tractor.' 'You've never seen quite so fierce a little boy as you were,' she told me. She tried to explain that I couldn't get my father in a tractor. Apparently I looked at her and narrowed my eyes and said 'In that case, I'm going in a double-decker bus,' and stomped off. Which is kind of funny, but it's very sad, as well. (Roger Waters)
In the finished article, the only thing that is important is whether it moves you or not. There is nothing else that is important at all. View quote
Roger Waters
What it comes down to for me is: Will the technologies of communication and culture - and especially popular music, which is a vast and beloved enterprise - help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart? View quote
Roger Waters
I had at one point this rather depressing image of some alien culture seeing the death of this planet - coming down in their spaceships and sniffing around; finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets and trying to work out why our end came before its time and they come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death.. View quote
Roger Waters
Well, anyway, I am one of the best five writers to come out of English music since the War. View quote
Roger Waters
Well, he's schizophrenic. And has been since 1968. View quote
Roger Waters
Regarding the spate of High School shootings of 1999: "in the Colorado shootings, the media seemed to change their tack a bit. Though they attached ghoulishly to it, covered it 24 hours a day and even gave it a logo like 'Horror in the Rockies', they did address issues of alienation and pain rather than just saying, 'oh, these aberrant teen-agers have to be stamped out.' After denigrating self-help ideas for the last 20 years, the media are beginning to look at the psychology and not just the police work." View quote
Roger Waters
I'm not saying the battle is won But on Saturday night all those kids in the sun Wrested technology's sword from the hands of the warlords Ooh, the tide is turning Ooh, the tide is turning. View quote
Roger Waters
It was very, very hard work organizing that Wall concert but everyone was fabulous to work with - Bryan Adams, Van Morrison, Cyndi Lauper, bloody brilliant. All brilliant. Except for Sinead O'Connor... She doesn't understand anything. She's just a silly little girl. You can't just lie in the corner and shave your bloody head and stick it up your arse and occasionally pull it out to go (_"brogue"_) 'Oh, I tink this is wrong and dat is wrong' and burst into tears. View quote
Roger Waters
I could never aspire to Syd's crazed insights and perceptions. In fact for a long time I wouldn't have dreamt of claiming any insights whatsoever. I'll always credit Syd with the connection he made between his personal unconscious and the collective group unconscious. It's taken me 15 years to get anywhere near there. Even though he was clearly out of control when making his two solo albums, some of the work is staggeringly evocative. It's the humanity of it all that's so impressive. It's about deeply felt values and beliefs. Maybe that's what 'Dark Side of the Moon' was aspiring to. A similar feeling. View quote
Roger Waters
Either you write songs or you don't. And if you do write songs like I do, I think there's a natural desire to want to make records. So, when I left Pink Floyd, I guess I had two, no three choices open to me: Not to do it anymore, which is daft as I was writing songs, although I suppose I could have written for other people, but I like making records; so I could either do it as Roger Waters or I could have got together with other people and said hey, why don't we start a band? But my view of bands had been jaundiced slightly by my previous experience, so I think that was something I never considered. (Roger Waters)
Have you heard It was on the news Your child can read you like a bedtime story Like a magazine Like a has-been out to grass Like afternoon T. V. Why is my life going by so fast? View quote
Roger Waters
We've got the recording side together and not the playing side. View quote
Roger Waters
Bob Ezrin about Waters: "I hate the word "artist," but I would definitely concede that Roger is a great artist...as well as a total obsessive and psychiatrist's dream." View quote
Roger Waters
For us the most important thing is to be visual, and for the cats watching us to have fun. This is all we want. We get very upset if people get bored when we're only half way through smashing the second set. Then all of a sudden they hear Arnold Layne and they flip all over again. View quote
Roger Waters
Oh, for fuck sake stop lighting off fireworks and shouting & screaming I'm trying to sing a song! I mean I don't care. If you don't want to hear it. You know fuck you. I'm sure there are a lot of people here who do want to hear it. So why don't you just be quiet. If you want to light your fireworks off go outside and light them off out there and if you want to shout and scream well then go and do it out there.... but. I am trying to sing a song that some people want to listen to. I want to listen to it. View quote
Roger Waters
Are there any paranoids in the audience tonight? (the crowd cheers) Is there anyone who worries about things? (the crowd cheers again) Pathetic. This is for all the weak people in the audience! Is there anyone here who's weak? (the crowd cheers once more) This is for you, it's called Run Like Hell! (the song starts) View quote
Roger Waters
It's actually quite emotional, standing up here with these three guys after all these years, standing to be counted with the rest of you. Anyway, we're doing this for everyone who's not here, and particulary of course for Syd. View quote
Roger Waters
I think that happiness resides somewhere between the extremes of personal, religious, and political. I think happiness resides where we understand someone else's point of view and needs. Happiness resides where we are not lost in the solitary dream. View quote
Roger Waters
I'm not a huge practicing Christian myself, but it just staggers me that people who claim to be can stand up and spout – like your president George Bush – can stand up and spout this bullshit about God supporting one side over another in war, which is why I wrote the lyrics of the song "What God Wants": "God wants crusade/God wants Jihad.” Well it may well be that God doesn't want either of those things. They're manifestations of the insecurities of the Muslim and Christian communities. I hate when someone uses religion to bolster war in the world: it's extremely disgusting and offensive for me, and for all christians, because that was not what Christ was trying to teach. View quote
Roger Waters
Not the torturer will scare me, nor the body's final fall, nor the barrels of death's rifles, nor the shadows on the wall, nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain, is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world. (Roger Waters)
It's a miracle was the last track recorded for the album, we based it on the rhythm from the middle of 'Late Home Tonight, where there's Graham Broad playing lots and lots of drums with me shouting in the background, pretending to be a mad Arab leader. View quote
Roger Waters
I'm in competition with myself and I'm losing. View quote
Roger Waters
I could have been an architect, but I don't think I'd have been very happy. Nearly all modern architecture is a silly game as far as I can see. View quote
Roger Waters
Earlier this year we went skiing and I was in a shop, paying a bill and there was a woman standing there whom I knew slightly. I was waiting for my bill and she was buying something, a tea strainer. Quite suddenly she said to me, 'Where was your Father killed?'. I was very surprised and blurted out 'Oh Anzio'. Now this is a woman of about my age, so she's 40-ish. She said, 'My Father was killed in the war'. Apparently somebody lent her a copy of 'The Final Cut' and she had listened to the whole thing and she had found it very moving. In fact she said it had moved her to tears. She told me this, standing in the shop, with some effort I suspect, and I remember thinking: That's enough really. It doesn't matter if the Americans don't buy it. View quote
Roger Waters